In The Anti-Heroine on Contemporary Television: Transgressive Women, Molly Brost explores the various applications and definitions of the term anti-heroine, showing that it has been applied to a wide variety of female characters on television that have little in common beyond their failure to behave in morally “correct” and traditionally feminine ways. Rather than dismiss the term altogether, Brost employs the term to examine what types of behaviors and characteristics cause female characters to be labeled anti-heroines, how those qualities and behaviors differ from those that cause men to be labeled anti-heroes, and how the label reflects society’s attitudes toward and beliefs about women. Using popular television series such as Jessica Jones, Scandal, and The Good Place, Brost acknowledges the problematic nature of the term anti-heroine and uses it as a starting point to study the complex women on television, analyzing how the broadening spectrum of character types has allowed more nuanced portrayals of women’s lives on television.

"This volume offers a stimulating perspective on the status of representations of a new kind of female character who emerged on the scene on US television in the mid-2000s, that of the anti-heroine. This new figure rivaled her earlier counterpart, the anti-hero, in terms of her complexity, and was multi-layered and morally flawed. Looking at the cable channels Showtime and HBO, as well as Netflix and ABC Television, this volume examines a range of recent television women and shows, including Homeland, Weeds, Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder, Veep, Girls, and Orange is the New Black as well as a host of other nighttime programs to demonstrate just how dominant the anti-heroine has become on US television. It examines how the figure has arisen within the larger context of the turn towards "Quality Television", that has itself been viewed as part of the post-network era or the "Third Golden Age" of television where new forms of broadcast delivery have created a marketing incentive to deliver more compelling characters to niche audiences. By including an exploration of the historical circumstances, as well as the industrial context in which the anti-heroine became the dominant leading female character on nighttime television, the book offers a fascinating study that sits at the intersection of gender studies and television. As such, it will appeal to scholars of popular culture, sociology, cultural and media studies.

This volume offers a stimulating perspective on the status of representations of a new kind of female character who emerged on the scene on US television in the mid-2000s, that of the anti-heroine. This new figure rivaled her earlier counterpart, the anti-hero, in terms of her complexity, and was multi-layered and morally flawed. Looking at the cable channels Showtime and HBO, as well as Netflix and ABC Television, this volume examines a range of recent television women and shows, including Homeland, Weeds, Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder, Veep, Girls, and Orange is the New Black as well as a host of other nighttime programs to demonstrate just how dominant the anti-heroine has become on US television. It examines how the figure has arisen within the larger context of the turn towards “Quality Television”, that has itself been viewed as part of the post-network era or the “Third Golden Age” of television where new forms of broadcast delivery have created a marketing incentive to deliver more compelling characters to niche audiences. By including an exploration of the historical circumstances, as well as the industrial context in which the anti-heroine became the dominant leading female character on nighttime television, the book offers a fascinating study that sits at the intersection of gender studies and television. As such, it will appeal to scholars of popular culture, sociology, cultural and media studies.

This book focuses on the emergence of female characters in typically male roles, particularly in the crime and prison drama genres. Contributors explore the role of race and sexuality, focusing on the transgression of female identity, and examine how bad women are portrayed and how they reveal the challenges by women to social and economic norms.

The New Female Antihero examines the hard-edged spies, ruthless queens, and entitled slackers of twenty-first-century television. The last ten years have seen a shift in television storytelling toward increasingly complex storylines and characters. In this study, Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman zoom in on a key figure in this transformation: the archetype of the female antihero. Far from the sunny, sincere, plucky persona once demanded of female characters, the new female antihero is often selfish and deeply unlikeable. In this entertaining and insightful study, Hagelin and Silverman explore the meanings of this profound change in the role of women characters. In the dramas of the new millennium, they show, the female antihero is ambitious, conniving, even murderous; in comedies, she is self-centered, self-sabotaging, and anti-aspirational. Across genres, these female protagonists eschew the part of good girl or role model. In their rejection of social responsibility, female antiheroes thus represent a more profound threat to the status quo than do their male counterparts. From the devious schemers of Game of Thrones, The Americans, Scandal, and Homeland, to the joyful failures of Girls, Broad City, Insecure, and SMILF, female antiheroes register a deep ambivalence about the promises of liberal feminism. They push back against the myth of the modern-day super-woman—she who “has it all”—and in so doing, they give us new ways of imagining women’s lives in contemporary America.

The antihero prevails in recent American drama television series. Characters such as mobster kingpin Tony Soprano (The Sopranos), meth cook and gangster-in-the-making Walter White (Breaking Bad) and serial killer Dexter Morgan (Dexter) are not morally good, so how do these television series make us engage in these morally bad main characters? And what does this tell us about our moral psychological make-up, and more specifically, about the moral psychology of fiction? Vaage argues that the fictional status of these series deactivates rational, deliberate moral evaluation, making the spectator rely on moral emotions and intuitions that are relatively easy to manipulate with narrative strategies. Nevertheless, she also argues that these series regularly encourage reactivation of deliberate, moral evaluation. In so doing, these fictional series can teach us something about ourselves as moral beings—what our moral intuitions and emotions are, and how these might differ from deliberate, moral evaluation.

The first comprehensive encyclopedia for the growing fields of media and communication studies, the Encyclopedia of Media and Communication is an essential resource for beginners and seasoned academics alike. Contributions from over fifty experts and practitioners provide an accessible introduction to these disciplines' most important concepts, figures, and schools of thought – from Jean Baudrillard to Tim Berners Lee, and podcasting to Peircean semiotics. Detailed and up-to-date, the Encyclopedia of Media and Communication synthesizes a wide array of works and perspectives on the making of meaning. The appendix includes timelines covering the whole historical record for each medium, from either antiquity or their inception to the present day. Each entry also features a bibliography linking readers to relevant resources for further reading. The most coherent treatment yet of these fields, the Encyclopedia of Media and Communication promises to be the standard reference text for the next generation of media and communication students and scholars.

Disruptive Women of Literature: Rooting for the Antiheroine critically examines the representation of the literary antiheroine in contemporary Gothic and crime-thriller novels and traces her emergence from the deviant women of Greek mythology and Shakespeare to the twenty-first century. It explores how the antiheroine shifts dependent on genre, time period, and format, demonstrating that she is capable of both challenging and reaffirming problematic ideologies surrounding women, power, violence, sexuality, and motherhood. Eleanore Gardner argues that the antiheroine is almost always defined by her experience of a patriarchal trauma and must therefore navigate her identity differently and more complexly than her antihero counterpart. The author examines a broad range of texts to understand the antiheroine’s fluidity, her liminal and abject existence, and what these suggest about cultural anxieties surrounding transgressive women.

A phenomenal account, newly updated, of how twelve innovative television dramas transformed the medium and the culture at large, featuring Sepinwall’s take on the finales of Mad Men and Breaking Bad. In The Revolution Was Televised, celebrated TV critic Alan Sepinwall chronicles the remarkable transformation of the small screen over the past fifteen years. Focusing on twelve innovative television dramas that changed the medium and the culture at large forever, including The Sopranos, Oz, The Wire, Deadwood, The Shield, Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 24, Battlestar Galactica, Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, Sepinwall weaves his trademark incisive criticism with highly entertaining reporting about the real-life characters and conflicts behind the scenes. Drawing on interviews with writers David Chase, David Simon, David Milch, Joel Surnow and Howard Gordon, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, and Vince Gilligan, among others, along with the network executives responsible for green-lighting these groundbreaking shows, The Revolution Was Televised is the story of a new golden age in TV, one that’s as rich with drama and thrills as the very shows themselves.

This volume of essays provides a critical foray into the methods used to construct narratives which foreground antiheroines, a trope which has become increasingly popular within literary media, film, and television. Antiheroine characters engage constructions of motherhood, womanhood, femininity, and selfhood as mediated by the structures that socially prescribe boundaries of gender, sex, and sexuality. Within this collection, scholars of literary, cultural, media, and gender studies address the complications of representing agency, autonomy, and self-determination within narrative texts complicated by age, class, race, sexuality, and a spectrum of privilege that reflects the complexities of scripting women on and off screen, within and beyond the page. This collection offers perspectives on the alternate narratives engendered through the motivations, actions, and agendas of the antiheroine, while engaging with the discourses of how such narratives are employed both as potentially feminist interventions and critiques of access, hierarchy, and power.